#3 From Tech Standards to a Newsletter

          

           The ELA standards that I feel most comfortable with are Using Digital Media, and Using Technology.  I am most comfortable with these asI have grown up as a "digital native".  I have been working or playing with computers for as long as I can remember, and I have had my own since I was in 8th grade.  I have also had a smartphone since 8th grade.  I am very comfortable working with others through technology to reach a common goal and using the internet.  I also have a lot of experience with audio and video recordings and distribution.  In high school, I made many recordings using my trumpet and laptop.  Over time I grew more and more skilled at the editing process.  I also have had experience editing video files in iMovie, for school and family.

On the opposite spectrum what I will need more work in is Multimedia.  For both literature and informal text.  Of course, I have experience in both of these fields from my years of high school and middle school.  However, it is not something that I am as fluent in as digital media or technology in general.  I will need to work most on the analysis of multiple sources.  Growing up, any subject that involved heavy analysis was one that I needed to work very hard on to do well.  I feel as though I will need to become better at it however, because comparing text to digital media could come in very handy in a social science class. 

           My major allows me to be able to work with a very wide age range of students.  I will have the opportunity to work with students from age 11 to 18.  However, with that said, my preference is to work with students in the range of 16-18.  Also, not only do I get a wide variety of age from my major, I also will have the opportunity to use a wide variety of technology.  One of the most common uses, I would like to implement would be discussion boards.  I want students to be able to post to the rest of their classmates and have discussions over the assignments at hand.  To go about this, I may use a system the school has on their website like my high school did, or use an online blog, if the school I work at would allow.  Of course, I will also implement research through the internet in order to complete assignments, if the task at hand calls for it. 

           Because of this use of technology, I will need to make sure that the students follow the majority of the digital citizenship concepts.  The most important will be that they demonstrate “netiquette”.  As I wish to have the students post to a discussion board and comment on one another’s posts, I will need to make sure that they are doing this in a respectful and professional manner.  I will also need to demonstrate how to properly protect one’s personal information.  To publish something online if the posts are public we will need to find a way to continue with the assignments while also not sharing personal information.  If they are using information that is not their own they will also need to understand the copyright laws at hand and properly source their info.

          The Open Education movement is based upon the idea that people want to learn and that it is their right to learn.  The essence of knowledge is sharing, and the movement wishes to capitalize on that.  To spread knowledge around the world freely is the goal.  This would be able to help a wide variety of people.  From those simply seeking knowledge, to students needing access o scholarly works, to workers needing more information about a job.  To spread this knowledge freely around the world would allow not only access but free modification of the information at hand as well.  To spread awareness the the organization behind the movement holds a special week out of the year dedicated to informing the world of the project.  openeducationweek.org  

         Open Content serves the purpose of the individual works that are able to be distributed due to their copyright.  As told in the podcast, this is done through the four R's, or five according to opencontent.org. Retain gives the user the right to own and control copies of the work.  The is the essential backbone of the open content movement.  Reuse gives the user the ability to show the work in a classroom or as a part of a project, or however else they see fit.  The ability to revise also is given to the consumer so that they may adapt or modify the work.  Through the remix function, one can take the original work and manipulate it with another.  Finally redistribute lets one share copies of the work, either the original or ones remix thereof.  The content however becomes less and less open through stricter legal restrictions and poor technical choices such as being published in an exotic format.  

          The basis of the Open Source Initiative is to promote non-proprietary software.  Software that is public and can be accessed by anyone.  This allows software to become far more ubiquitous and keeps predatory venders from growing. The initiative is based on trust and allowing cooperation between more and more groups.  Through this cooperation, more and more innovation is able to take place in a far more accessible fashion.  This was able to grow due to the widespread fame of Linux in the 1990's allowing more and more coders to work with one another and promote education on a widespread field.  

          Working on my Newsletter was able to teach me more about Microsoft Word than I had previously expected.  In its beginning I was not too thrilled simply because it was homework, however once I finished I felt a sense of pride over my work.  It is far from the best, but I feel as though it fits the theme of the class I created, and therefore had a reality to it.  By that I mean, formatting the newsletter made me feel like I was an actual teacher and I will absolutely utilize that skill in my career.  From from working on the assignment, I was able to the ins and outs of word art, shapes, and formatting for Word on Mac.  There were always slight differences that tripped me up when creating anything other than a paper, but by the end, I was able to fly through my editing and formatting with ease.  One of my biggest accomplishments came from learning how to properly manage the multiple columns and articles.  

          Next time, I feel that I could add more color and images to it.  I kept it as a faded yellow, because I wanted it to appear to be written on an old document, however for future and different assignments more color would work very well and I feel far more comfortable with that idea now.  I feel as though I can also improve on the use of word art.  While I tend to not care for it as I think it can be a little too unprofessional, there is a definite "sweet spot" of sorts that is still professional while also adding more life to a page.  I feel as though I can work more in the future to reaching that point.